 97% of scientists, including by the way some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest. They've acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it. A survey of thousands of scientific papers that took a position on climate change found that 97% endorsed the position that humans are causing global warming. 97% of scientists who have written in peer-reviewed journals say the following, climate change is real, it is significantly caused by human activity. 97% of scientists the world over have said that climate change is urgent and man-made and must be addressed. For over a decade, study after study has found that 97% of publishing climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. But what do the general public think? I'm here at the Brisbane City Mall to find out. What percentage of climate scientists do you think agree that humans are causing global warming? 95%, probably 50%. 75%, actually. 80%, yeah. 85%. Would you like to know who was closer then? I think I was closer. 100%. Between 5% and 10%? Not a lot. Hang on, sorry, other way around. 95%. Let's put 50%. I would say 80%. 95%. I would say 50% off. There's a huge gap between what many of the public think about the scientific consensus and the actual 97% agreement among climate scientists. Why is there such a large consensus gap? One contributor is misinformation. The 97% figure that's thrown around, the head of the UN IPC said that number was pulled out of thin air. That 97% number, that's been debunked in several studies. That is 97% is essentially pulled from thin air. The stat about the 97% of scientists is based on one discredited study. 97% of all scientists believe- Is this a bogus number? It's so not a bogus number. It's so bogus. Okay, yours is mine. Yours is mine. From clips like this, you'd think there's a vigorous debate about whether scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. We're often exposed to contradictory messages in the media. How do we see through the misinformation and get to the truth about consensus? I joined with scientists who authored seven of the key studies into the consensus on climate change. When we looked collectively at the wide range of consensus studies, we found that the expert scientific consensus on human cause global warming is between 90% to 100%. The higher the expertise in climate science, the stronger the agreement on human cause global warming. When you get to climate scientists who have published peer-reviewed climate research, there's 97% agreement. But the fact that consensus gets stronger with higher expertise is exploited by those looking to cast doubt on the consensus. They do this by selecting groups of scientists that have lower expertise in climate science to get a lower level of scientific agreement and argue that there's no consensus. Using non-experts to cast out on the expert consensus is a key characteristic of science denial known as the appeal to fake experts. This approach was employed by Richard Toll in a comment criticising the 97% consensus. Toll misrepresented a number of consensus studies betraying non-expert groups as representative of the expert consensus. The scientists who authored those studies were none too happy with how their research was misrepresented. But on the positive side Toll's misrepresentation of all those studies brought the authors of seven key studies together to publish a full view on the scientific consensus on climate change. Our paper established a consensus on the consensus being between 90% to 100% expert agreement on human cause global warming with a number of studies finding 97% consensus.